Education bill to foster nationalism, human values

Edith Hartanto and Novan Iman Santosa, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Many wonder why young Indonesians today fail to reach the level of intellectual capacity that the youth had during the era of their founding fathers.

Sukarno, Hatta or Sjahrir were towering intellectuals in their young age during the Dutch colonial period.

Yet, since that time there has been a steady decline, which begs the question of what is the goal of education? Has the ongoing deliberation of the National Education System bill set the right guidelines for a better education system?

The aim of education, according to the bill, is to "develop participants' potential to believe and be faithful to one God, and to being healthy, competent, skilled, creative, independent, aesthetic, democratic, responsible people with civic and nationalistic sensibilities."

Noted educator Arief Rachman who helped draft the bill said the basic question underlying the bill was whether we want to measure the brains or the person as a human being.

"What happened in the past few decades since the fall of Sukarno in 1966 is that the state overlooked the development of the spiritual aspect of education which has to go side by side with academics and the achievement of knowledge," he said.

Mochtar Buchori, another prominent educator, said education should be directed at creating a generation capable of recreating a new generation by forging a sense of nationalism.

"Our founding fathers, such as Wahidin Sudirohusodo, are a perfect example of how a generation could create a new generation," he said, "the year 1928 was the start of our nationhood while our independence in 1945 was the start of our nation state."

Wahidin founded the Boedi Oetomo student movement in 1908 which led to a monumental historic achievement in the 1928 Youth Pledge in which youths from various ethnic groups pledged to set up one country and one nation with one language: Indonesian.

Following Sukarno's downfall, the country's orientation was more on economic growth, Arief said.

"Thus education has been perceived as a means to achieve academic goals based on knowledge and technology, casting aside the humanity aspect, the spiritual faculty and social aspects," he said.

Values of nationalism, citizenship, humanity, aestheticism and democracy so far have been conveyed in the form of text book presentations rather than practical implementation.

"Students are ordered to memorize facts about certain values from books and not by actually behaving and practicing those themselves. Under such a system, we have created some awkward generations... who are not proud of their identity and who have lost their sense on nationalism," Arief said.

Mochtar, who is also a legislator from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan) faction, said the success of the Dutch education system in creating nationalists was "an unintended result" because the system allowed students to expand upon the facts and intellectually contemplate things in the context of history and other things.

"The Dutch colonial power never included nationalism for Indonesian students in its curriculum but still our founding fathers got some of it.

"They acquired it thanks to their solid education which emphasized intellectual capacity and thought. And they learned and understood foreign languages and history, not merely memorizing the chronology," he said.

In the immediate past, the catch word for education was to create a "whole human being".

The phrase may have become a household name in Soeharto's years but not many people were sure about what it really meant. The result was a constant change in education policy each time a new minister took over.

One of the most recent examples was the "link and match" policy in which universities were geared to answer the demand of industry.

The only way to make a breakthrough in this false policy is to set up a balanced education, Arief said.

"The current bill has attempted to offset this defect by giving more room for humanities and spiritual education apart from the scientific knowledge," he said.

Arief said that the younger generation are incomparable to that of Sukarno-Hatta era.

"Sukarno and Hatta were born in a different time of history with different challenges. They're men of history, and that era will never reoccur," Arief said.